


and that kind of love

by peterpan_in_neverland



Category: Never Have I Ever (TV)
Genre: F/M, bhargavi this is your fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25217068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterpan_in_neverland/pseuds/peterpan_in_neverland
Summary: It has become a trend.It isn’t purposeful— the opposite, actually, if anything he tries to avoid having to rescue people at parties— but it is dangerously close to becoming a part of his reputation.Three times is a pattern, and this— carrying that tiny drunk Asian girl that had accused him of being a racist his junior year— is the third time he’s ended up saving someone’s ass.This is, officially, a pattern.--OR; Paxton rescues a drunk Eleanor from a party
Relationships: Paxton Hall-Yoshida/Eleanor Wong
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32





	and that kind of love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magnetichearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnetichearts/gifts).



> this is all your fault, bhargavi, but i love you anyway
> 
> this is lowkey a companion to "let there be damage ensued and tabloid news" but you can read them separately

It has become a trend. 

It isn’t purposeful— the opposite, actually, if anything he tries to  _ avoid  _ having to rescue people at parties— but it is dangerously close to becoming a part of his reputation. 

Three times is a pattern, and this— carrying that tiny drunk Asian girl that had accused him of being a racist his junior year— is the third time he’s ended up saving someone’s ass. 

This is, officially, a pattern. 

* * *

“You should  _ probably  _ take her to the emergency room,” her friend says, and unbuckles her seatbelt, climbing into the backseat. 

“Whoa, so you’re just gonna— okay,” he replies, tightening his fingers against the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. 

“She was lying on her back,” the girl answers— Paxton wants to say that her name is Phoebe, or something equally ridiculous, but he doesn’t want to risk testing it out. She has shifted her friend onto her side, her head in her lap, facing the back of the passenger seat. “If she threw up, she would choke.” 

“You’d rather her throw up in your lap?” he asks, then cringes. It’s a dumb question, for a lot of reasons, but especially because he knows he would rather have Trent throw up in his lap over choking on his own vomit. “Forget I asked that.” 

“Gladly.” 

They’re quiet for a moment, before Paxton can’t help himself any longer. “What’s your name, again? Both of your names, actually.” 

“Fabiola, she’s Eleanor,” the girl— Fabiola, now— answers, then whispers, “dick,” under her breath. 

Paxton sighs, and leans his head back against the headrest. It is going to be a long, long night. 

* * *

He doesn’t take her to the emergency room, and Fabiola berates him for it. He lays Eleanor down on the living room couch and throws a light blanket over her, then ducks into the kitchen, grabbing a glass to fill with water. 

“What if she has alcohol poisoning, Paxton?” she asks, half shouting, and Paxton rolls his eyes. It has been two minutes and forty nine seconds— he is watching the clock behind her head— since she has started talking, and he has not interrupted once. Strangely, he thinks she needs this, and he’s chill enough to handle her yelling.

“She doesn’t have alcohol poisoning,” Rebecca yells from the living room, and pokes her head into the kitchen, “she’s just drunk and trying to sleep it off.” 

“How would _you_ know?” Fabiola asks, entirely too condescendingly, and Paxton is about to yell at her before he sees the scared look on her face. She’s just worried about Eleanor— he is, too, even if he can’t figure out why— and he needs to learn not to be so protective over Rebecca. 

Rebecca puts her hands on her hips. “First of all, because I know everything, ask him.” She points to Paxton, and he nods quickly. Rebecca has always been disturbingly omniscient, from a young age, and Paxton wishes he knew how. “Second of all, because she told me— you two aren’t exactly  _ quiet,  _ y’know?” 

“Shit,” Paxton says, even though he isn’t really sure why he cares. Probably because this is a pattern now, a  _ habit  _ for him. He can already hear Trent joking about getting him business cards:  _ Paxton Hall-Yoshida, certified party saviour,  _ and the thought makes him a little queasy. “Is she awake?”

“Awake and languishing,” Rebecca replies, leaning against the entryway into the kitchen. “She’s  _ really  _ dramatic, more than the average drunk.” 

“Yeah, she’s just— like that,” Fabiola says, then takes the glass of water out of Paxton’s hand, marching into the living room defiantly. 

“Do you know these people?” Rebecca asks him, arching an eyebrow. 

“They’re Devi’s friends, but not really, to be honest,” he tells her, and shrugs. Devi and him are friends— she was too conflicted, over what, Paxton doesn’t know, but they had managed to stay friends, and so it shocks him a little that he doesn’t know much about Fabiola and Eleanor. He didn’t even know their names until tonight.

The thought strikes him, suddenly, that he may never have been listening, but it’s quickly pushed away when he hears the distinct sound of someone running to the bathroom, gagging. 

“Oh, no,” Rebecca says, and wrinkles her nose, “she’s a puker.” 

“Seems that way, Becca.” 

“I can’t believe you brought home a puker.” 

“She probably had a lot to drink— there was a college kid there making some really impressive mixed drinks, and girls like those,” Paxton says, and Rebecca laughs. 

“Yeah, and there’s, like, four hundred times the amount of alcohol in a mixed drink than in a beer,” Rebecca tells him, her voice laced with humour. 

“Seriously?” 

“Oh, you poor, sweet, naïve little man,” Rebecca says, and puts her hands on his shoulders, looking him in the eyes, “I could drink you under the table.”

* * *

“Goddammit,” Fabiola says, looking at her phone. She catches her bottom lip in between her teeth, and starts typing furiously. “Shit.” 

“What?” Paxton finally asks, looking up from his notebook. He’d started taking school seriously his junior year after he had hurt his arm and been in danger of losing his athletes scholarship, and to his (and everyone else’s) surprise, he found that he kind of likes it.

“My parents want me home.” She looks up, flicking her gaze between Eleanor— curled into a ball on the couch, snoring— and Paxton, sitting at the family computer, scribbling down some notes from one of his summer courses. 

“Okay?” 

“You don’t see the problem?” 

Paxton sets his pencil back down, and turns to face her, putting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward. “No.” 

“I can’t leave her with you.”

“Oh, for the love of  _ God,”  _ Paxton says, and leans back in his seat, stretching his arms back behind his head. 

“What? It’s a legitimate concern.” 

“Fabiola,” he starts, refusing to turn to look at her, “I know how to take care of drunk people.” 

“But what if she—” 

“I know what I’m doing,” he reassures, “do you need me to see my credentials? Do I have to call Trent, or something?” 

He can see the line of her shoulder relax out of the corner of his eye. “Okay,” Fabiola says, “but I swear to God, if something happens to her—” 

“Nothing will—” 

“I’ll kill you. With my bare hands, Hall-Yoshida.” 

“Not the first time I’ve heard that, actually,” he says, and turns to face her now. She’s grabbed her purse, and is leaning against the front door. “I think Rebecca told me that  _ exact _ same thing when I took the last bagel Tuesday morning.” 

Fabiola laughs— she hasn’t done that all night. “Bye, Paxton. Just… take care of her, okay?” 

“I will,” he promises, “get home safe.” 

* * *

Eleanor wakes up at one-twenty-seven in the morning, and almost steps on him. 

He’s asleep on the floor in between the couch and the coffee table. He just did not feel right leaving her in the living room by himself, and the cat has claimed the recliner, so he pulled the cushions from his futon into the livingroom and set them up on the floor.

He startles, waking easily, and sits up straight to face her. “You okay?” he asks, rubbing his eyes, his voice thick with sleep. 

“My head is fucking pounding and— wait, what the fuck?” she asks, shaking her head, then looking around. “This is  _ not  _ the house I blacked out in.” 

“It’s my house— Paxton’s,” he says, in case she doesn’t recognize him in the dark, and she squints, the corners of her mouth pulled down into the most impressive frown that Paxton has ever seen.

“Why am I in your house?” 

“You blacked out at the party, and I was walking by and I ended up, y’know, carrying you out and driving you here,” he explains, and feels a little dumb doing it. 

“Where's Fabiola?” 

“She had to go home.” He grabs his phone off the coffee table, and clicks it on to check the time. “It’s one-thirty, in the morning.”

“And I’m still here?” she asks, and he realizes she is asking mostly for herself. 

“I can drive you home, if you want?”

“No, it’s fine, your couch is weirdly comfortable,” she tells him, and he files that information away for later, for something else entirely. She lays back down, settled against the cushions, when she speaks up again, “what’s your favourite colour?” 

“What?” Paxton asks, completely caught off guard. He’s been asked a lot of late night questions— he’s spent hours with drunk teenagers, and he’s heard some ridiculous queries. But, somehow, out of everything he has been asked, this one is the strangest. His favourite  _ colour?  _ Who even asked that anymore? 

“Yellow,” he answers, taps his thumbs against his chest. “Yours?” 

“Pink. Why do you like yellow?” 

“Rebecca's room was painted yellow when she first came home,” he answers, and then exhales. 

_ What the fuck?  _

He has never told anyone that, not even Trent, not even Rebecca, so why  _ Eleanor?  _ Eleanor, who had shouted at him in the hallway and accused him of being a racist, had passed out drunk on his couch and puked in his bathroom. 

He considers that that is one of Eleanor's qualities. That she makes people trust her, pulls them in, something all encompassing like a whirlpool or a tornado or a flashlight shined in your eyes in the dark. He wants to lean into her, and there is a sudden, overwhelming feeling pulsing through him that makes him want to tell her every single one of his secrets. 

He pushes the feeling down, but it roars back up, and he realizes that it is like trying to hold back the tide; the only way to do that is to eliminate the moon, but he has never wanted to do something less.

“Why do you like pink?” he asks, and hopes he is able to draw the same feeling out of her that she has elicited from him. 

“It’s a nice colour.” 

“Is that really why?” 

“No,” she admits, and Paxton watches the shadows on the wall move and change as she runs a hand over her face. “My mom left when I was little, but we would always chew that Hubba Bubba tape stuff, and I guess that shade of pink kind of… stuck with me.” 

“Oh,” he breathes, and doesn’t offer platitudes. He has always been bad at them, anyway, and in his own experience, hearing them isn’t helpful. “I was always more of a Juicy Fruit man, myself.” 

“Of course you were,” she says, “it’s yellow.” 

He laughs— she makes him laugh— and it is like something that unlocks his entire life, and her questions are endless. They’re silly things— favourite carnival ride, favourite bird— she even asks what he dips his French fries in, and he tells her. 

Ferris wheel, goldfinch, mayonnaise. 

“Mayonnaise?” she repeats, her voice dripping with dramatic disgust. “Isn’t that how French people eat them?” 

“I think so,” he answers, “did you know that French fries came from Belgium?”

“No.” Eleanor is sleepy, he knows she is, he can tell from her voice, the willowy, breathy tone she’s speaking in. And it is confirmed when she drops an arm off the couch, trailing her finger up his arm until she reaches his hand, and laces their fingers together. He inhales— Eleanors hands are small, and they feel fragile, unbelievably pristine, like the porcelain dolls his  _ baba _ collected, and the warmth of her hand offsets and smooths the cold of his own— and squeezes her hand softly. She sighs. “Tell me more about French fries, Paxton.” 

He likes this. And he wants to hate that he likes it, because she is still maybe-sorta-probably-a-little drunk, and she is Devi’s friend— if there was ever a moment for bro code, it would be now— but then Eleanor smooths her thumb up and down the length of his, and he lets his worries melt away. Even if it is only for tonight. 

He tells her everything he knows: that it’s disputed whether or not they  _ really  _ came from Belgium or France (“you lied to me, then”  _ “most  _ people think that they came from Belgium— its the accepted answer, Eleanor”), that they’re served differently in almost every country, that pretty much everywhere else but the United States calls them chips. 

When he finishes, she whispers, “has anyone ever told you that you’re really, really smart?” 

No. No, they haven’t. 

“Not in so many words.” 

“Well… you are,” she tells him, shifts a little on the couch, and Paxton is afraid that she’ll let go of his hand. She doesn’t, just pulls it closer to the couch. “In that encyclopedia type of way.” 

“Wait… what?” he’s tired. It’s weighing on his eyelids and settling behind his eyes, like an itch he can’t reach, and he knows it will only go away when he finally slips back to sleep, but he wants to remember this. 

“Like, I feel like you know a little bit about everything.” 

“Oh.” 

“It’s not a bad thing.” 

“I know.” 

“You just seem a little restless, like you need to pick up something new whenever you start to idle.” 

“You’re right,” he says, because it would be absurd for her to say no. Because, somehow, she knows inside and out him already. 

“I know I am,” she whispers, then squeezes his fingers, tight, “go to sleep, Paxton.” 

“I want to stay up with you.” 

“Go to sleep.” 

* * *

She is gone when he wakes up in the morning. 

It doesn’t surprise him, actually— usually, when a girl comes over late at night, he hopes that she is gone by morning— but it stings, and he misses her palm against his like he has lost something vital. 

He gets up, stretches, pads into the kitchen and finds Rebecca eating a bagel. “Hey, douche,” she says, and holds her hand out. There is a sticky note in between her fingers. “What the  _ hell _ does this mean?” 

He takes it, studies it. 

_ Paxton _

_ Thanks for the couch _

_ French fries, you and me, Saturday night. Sound good?  _

_ -El _

She has scrawled her phone number and a little drawing of a cat next to her name. Paxton smiles. 

“Oh, no,” Rebecca breathes, and puts her face in her hands, “what did you do to the poor girl?” 

**Author's Note:**

> this rarepair is the hill that i will die on, and i hope that you enjoyed it. leave a kudos if you did, and drop a comment, for they make my life better


End file.
